Stay at home and cook lady, let the man in charge go bring home the bacon!

as we did with Justina Pelletier.

social services over 'Justina Pelletier'? I thought the rants on DU were all about how wonderful Republicans were in her case, and how crappy Dems were?

I know around here, CPS has had a couple of high profile cases of taking children away from 'unfit' parents, and handing them over to foster parents who abused and murdered them.

do every f@cking day?

Ya, white privilege is just a myth.

Seriously, it's a criminal offense to not hover over your kid's shoulder 24/7?

Ugh, what a pathetic, sheltered society we've become.

How did I ever survive?

I walked a mile to & from school when I was 7. In the snow and rain. Sorry, the last part was a fib, but it sounded good.

"into a 30 mile an hour wind, uphill, both ways."

It's refreshing to escape America "home of the paranoid"

and your post is so spot on.

kids from the homes in the neighborhood and across the street walk to the park. are they suggesting a nine yr old child really is not allowed to go over to the park? or is it the mom was not handy and at work? thinking here, this makes no sense.

alone at the park while the mom was at work. Some 'good samaritan' called the cops and reported the mother.

This is where I miss 'the old days' of people looking out for each other & kids if needed. When I was young our neighbors always watched out for the kids in the neighborhood....my parents did as well.

There's no sense of community anymore...imo. I believe that to be a huge loss for people.

AS to a reply to the OP.

Are you saying that it is ok for some woman to call the police on a 9 yo?

I was answering/explaining

substitute. A lot of people wouldn't consider a cell phone to be an adequate alternative to a near-by designated adult presence. Not today.

A 9YO should be able to play in the park w/o adult supervision.

What am I missing here?

The other mothers notice? Not making accusations, just speculating.

my son would be out on his bike, exploring the countryside and being a child that he was often gone for hours and hours.

We, as I have no doubt this Mom did, hammered it in to him what to do if he was in trouble, if he was approached by a stranger, or even a friend that he knew was wanting something we wouldn't agree with.

volunteers who would love to help out mothers who work, even if only for temporary situations like this where her normal routine
fell apart!!??
The churches could advertise this outreach on Christian radio stations and on their little billboards.


Tikki

I must be OLD, Methuselah OLD -- because when I was nine it was so perfectly normal that kids played in the park unaccompanied that any parent that wouldn't let their kid play without a 24/7 minder watching their every move would've been considered abnormal. In fact, there simply weren't any! If there were, people would wonder what the problem was, what trauma the parents lived through that caused such over protectiveness.

My mom and the other ones shooed us all out in the morning, fed us haphazardly at lunch, and shooed us all out again until dinner. Even after dinner until dark, we were wild and free as long as we were in earshot. Some nights we walked to the movie theater and home again. Played in the park. Rode our bikes all over. Kind of like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. CPS is way too involved in kid's lives given their inability to offer substantive aid to help families survive.

They were 2 at the time. Two terrible 2's and a 10 year old? lol Not easy but I did it, but then I also was a NYC kid and rode SUBWAYS, and travelled around by myself, at that age. My parents should have been ARRESTED for letting me do this? City kids learn the ropes very young; then and still today.

And riding my bike a mike and a half into town to go to te library by myself at 8.

This is ridiculous.

At nine would hop on my bike after breakfast and would be all over the place with my friends...my parents never worried about us...and all kids in my town did the same thing...a kid who was not allowed to run free in the summertime was indeed an oddball.

These are strange times we live in, paranoia and fear seem to dominate our life.

When my mom finally gave me permission to ride my Buzz bike on the north side of town at 9 years old, I just kept going north, then west, and ended up in the next town. I even asked someone in the other town how to get to Oklahoma (I knew the state line had to be around there somewhere, and it was-- 30 miles away ). The person said "Oh, I think it's too far for you to make it on that little bicycle", so I turned around and headed back to my hometown. I was gone for several hours, but it was no big deal.

Nine years old is old enough to go out and play without a parent next to you. Anybody that says different is just to damn terrorized by sensationalist TV programs.

Admittedly, things were a little different back in the Stone Age when I was 9, but I left the house after breakfast, maybe came home for lunch, and had to be back home by dark. Same as every other kid I knew. We didn't have a "park", but had plenty of empty fields to play in and had a community pool about 2 miles away that we had to cross a major thoroughfare to get to and went there several times a week, all unsupervised by anybody's parent.

System fail in this case. Hope this woman gets somebody on her side to help her and her daughter out of this mess.

street lights on...time to go home. Even then often times we'd stay out in front/around the house. Neighbors always knew all the kids and looked out for everyone.

We had a park about 3-4 blocks away from my house...we were always there. All the kids were. And we didn't have cell phones back then..

came home for lunch ( or called me from a friend's house if they were invited for lunch there) and returned when the street lights came on.. They were in the neighborhood, and I could usually see them if I looked outside, but they also did exploring..

My brothers and I grew up on military bases. When our father was stationed in Selma Al (68-69), All summer long we played in valley creek (where while wading up stream about 2 miles we found a bloated dead cow). We played in the yard of the city sewage treatment plant which had a collection of goats, Pea hens, and a peacock.
Our house on Kessler AFB in Biloxi Ms is gone now, but the storm ditch where we used to catch box turtles is still there. The rotted dingy we used to go crabbing from is long gone.
The drainage ditches, fields of saw grass, and and jungle covered hill riddled with abandoned Japanese bunkers from WWII on Clark AFB we played in are buried under yards of ash from when Mt. Pinatubo erupted. Although I think the Base hospital that I was staying in (3 days, due to a right arm bruised finger tip to elbow) is still standing abandoned. From the forth floor window of that hospital; I watched them dig a WWII 500lb American bomb out of the ground they were building a new parking lot on (I'm thinking summer of 1966).

My brothers and I played unsupervised alone, in various pairs or in the trio since 1965 till now. We are alive, mostly healthy, currently not wanted by law enforcement, and trying to live the American dream handicapped by being on the lower end of the 99%.


This is a non issue. The child had a cell phone, was surrounded by her peers, and under the gaze of caring adults (the evidence being the call making parent). She was safe.

Me and my friends knew every inch of that place that a bicycle could go. The kids talked about a Japanese soldier in the jungle years before he came out and surrendered. My friends across the street had a divorced mom. There was a houseboy who supposedly watched the girls, but all we ever saw him do was take naps or chase us out of the house. We hung out at the teen clubhouse, the ball park, the outdoor movie theater, the beach. And we were younger than 9. Guam was an awesome place to grow up, but maybe military bases are like small insular towns (or were) with pretty tight rules. Kids seemed very safe. And we did hang out in packs. Playing war.

Of course, I lived in a little town of about 750.

On all counts.

to go to the park never crossed my parents' mind, or any parents of my friends...I suppose it was a different time, although there have to be some areas where this is still ok...I think the media makes us fear dangers that aren't always there.

Last edited Mon Jul 14, 2014, 08:13 PM - Edit history (1)

Elephant Rock in Simi Valley Ca. It was our playground. Sliding down rocks, avoiding cow pies, snakes, climbing to the top to eat lunch. The rocks did look like an Elephant. Also, we would look for lizards and snakes. Then not too far away there was a small pond with frogs and tadpoles for frog hunting at night during the summer. At 9, the kids in our neighborhood had to cross through the Junior High School campus to get to school. In 1969 and 1970 it was pretty scary at times. So glad I got to live in a time where electronics didn't rule my life, and play time was in the "real world".

<a href="http://imgur.com/JOdLgzk"><img src="" title="Hosted by imgur.com"/></a>

Oh for f*cks sake, people !!

Child Care and Birth Control.

Love, Peace and Shelter.

Our mom would drop us off at the community pool while she ran errands. Other parents kept an eye on us, and she would do the same with their kids when they had to run errands. None of us saw anything wrong with it. This was in the early 90s. Amazing how much things have changed since then.

I went to school and came home by myself without incident.

In Brooklyn!

...and I was 7 when I started 3rd grade. The public school was fine with it.

And I finished 3rd grade in another school, on Long Island, as my family moved that year. Again, walked home the 5 or so blocks. And this was what the school expected. There was no bus. There weren't cars coming to pick up all the kids. We all walked home.

then she said that 16 and 17 year olds should not be left home alone. I wrote and asked how the 9 year old could possibly safe with all this irresponsible 16 and 17 year olds out and about? I got no answer.

my parents had no problems with letting me go out with my bike to cycle around our neighbourhood when I was 7 or 8.

when I was a teen in the 80s & we'd go off to visit friends and swim in the lake. This was in the rural midwest so we actually spent a lot of time just riding to get places. We had to be home by dark.

WTF is wrong w/people?

in an overly paranoid society we now live in. I was riding my bike all around my neighborhood since I learned how to ride it. Go to friends houses (gasp.. before parental enforced, scheduled, and structured play dates), meet up at a local construction site with large dirt hills, play cops and robbers with our toy guns (and surprisingly none of us are killers).

I have two daughters, one is now 16 and the other is 9. My oldest would ride her bike to a friends house a neighborhood over and my youngest is allowed to ride her bike and even allowed to leave the circle. Doesn't seem like a criminal offense to me, then again I'm not some uptight busybody who needs something to complain about and involve myself into other peoples lives because they don't conform to my opinion.